June 04, 2016

Friday Night Movies 583

First up, Sword Of The Beast, a 1965 Japanese samurai film that was directed by Hideo Gosha. It's a story about a samurai called Gennosuke. He's on the run after killing a counselor. Misa, the daughter of the counselor, and her fiance, Daizaburo are in pursuit with some of the other samurai from their clan. Gennosuke had been set up by the deputy counselor in one of those double crosses that the pure evil do. There's a lot of that sort of activity in this movie and it sure reminds me that old Japan sucked big time.

Gennosuke winds up on a mountain with that has some gold on it. The mountain belongs to the Shogun. There's a death penalty for anyone who's poaching the Shogun's gold. Gennosuke comes across a man and his wife panning for gold and he wants it. The couple are collecting the gold to give to their clan, he hopes to gain favor and a salaried post from the work. That gold becomes the focus for the rest of the movie, especially after and a trio of thieves arrives. There's lot's of fighting as the various groups meet up on the mountain. People fall to flashing swords, their dead bodies litter the mountain. The poachers are surprised when the clan leader shows up to collect the gold and orders his men to kill them. Gennosuke arrives to late to save them so he kills the members of their clan. Serves them right, they were scum. And there were so many of them, it makes up understand why Zatoichi sure was busy killing the evil bastards. It's good movie, I enjoyed it for the second time. I like this sort of Samurai film, a straight forward story with the right amount of personal drama and action. Worth seeing.

Demonoid: Messenger Of Death is the second film by Alfredo Zacarias. He was the director of The Bees which we watched last week. The story is about a demonic hand that takes people over. An American miner and his British wife, played by Samantha Eggar, find a small metal casket in his mine in Mexico. It was placed there by some priests many years before and it contains the hand of a demon. The couple take the casket with them and it gets out of the casket. The demon takes over people. It wants to get to Samantha for some poorly written reason. Stuart Whitman plays a priest who tries to help out. The story is kind of weak and some of the parts were kind of dumb. There's a bunch of runnin' around and some people get killed before the end of the movie. There's the usual return scare and then it's over. Parts of it were filmed in Mexico and some in Las Angeles. Not quite as much fun as The Bees but still entertaining in that bad movie sort of way. We got some laughs from it. I wouldn't recommend it to most people but some horror fans would get a bit of enjoyment out of it.